After a sober prologue on the possible discovery & reburial of villagers who ‘disappeared’ in unmarked graves during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, Pedro Almodóvar shifts gears for (of all things) a switched-at-birth-babies story. A stretch even for Almodóvar to link up all the opposing tones & tropes before an epilogue returns us to that village. But credit due for packaging it all so beautifully. Favored muse Penélope Cruz is the fashionable & nearly forty photographer (single/childless) whose current assignment, archeological researcher Israel Elejalde, not only comes up with a possible plan of action on the gravesite, but also falls for Cruz. Nine months later . . . But when Cruz delivers, teenage maternity wing roommate Milena Smit goes into labor at the same time. And while the mix-up isn’t shown, the discovery is handled with a kind of grace that shows Almodóvar in full melodramatic Douglas Sirk form. (Hard not to reimagine the two woman with ‘50s Sirkian casting: Jane Wyman & Sandra Dee?) Abetted as usual with full saturated color from cinematographer José Luis Alcaine, and boasting an exceptional Alberto Iglesias score nicely recapped in the end credits. Considering how a young Almodóvar once thought his generation lived as if Generalissimo Franco had never existed, you can see how Smit’s cultural & political ignorance of the past has him rethinking his own youthful posturing. And if some of this feels shoe-horned in, the final scenes at the gravesite are intensely felt/intensely moving.
DOUBLE-BILL: Just as ancient Greeks & Romans followed serious plays with something sublimely comic, these old swapped-at-birthed tropes get hilariously twinned (nay, goosed) in START THE REVOLUTION WITHOUT ME/’70 which Donald Sutherland and an inspired Gene Wilder keep aloft for eight of its nine reels in spite of pretty lame filmmaking.
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